HUMAN CULTURE AND SPECIES

Compare and Contrast Human Culture with That of Other Species



Compare and Contrast Human Culture with That of Other Species

Introduction

Recent animal studies have led to the understanding that some of the population differences found in some species possess close similarities to human cultures. Understanding the evolution of human culture is one of the greatest challenges facing science. The gulf between the complexity of human culture, and cognition and that observed in other species is so vast that to many it has seemed unbridgeable. Nonetheless, evolutionary links are there to be found. Animals, as the supposed embodiments of nature, subjectively identify themselves as humans, and thus as cultural beings. Culture, and humanity, not limited to humanity and spirits, but extend to encompass nature as well (at least animalistic nature: the extent to which plants, and inanimate entities, so prominent in Tylor's concept of animism, included in Viveiros de Castro's conception of cultural identity remains unclear). Subjectively speaking, animals are human, albeit with different outward forms, which Viveiros de Castro dismisses as mere “envelopes” without significant or necessary connections to the subjective identity of the characteristic being within (Richerson, & Boyd, 2005). Similarly, the material forms of activities dissociated from their underlying cognitive content from the perspective of the animals that perform them. Animals thus supposedly see themselves as engaging in the same cultural activities as humans even as the objective forms of their activities appear to humans as animalistic, and uncultured. For example, jaguars, as they guzzle the blood of their victims, conceive themselves to be sipping fermented manioc beer, a typical cultural activity of (some, though by no means all) Amazonian cultures.

Discussion

Until recently, scientists regarded culture defined as socially transmitted behaviours as exclusive to humans, but there is growing recognition that many animals exhibit some sort of culture. Chimpanzees, which share 98% of their genes with humans, have the most varied set of behaviours documented in the animal world. The difference between humans and animals is growing less distinct, say some researchers. “It is not black and white,” says Kühl, who is Leinert's supervisor at the EVA.

In the old scenario, “only humans have culture”, says Jason Kamilar, a biogeographer in the department of anthropology at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. “Then, culture would be the defining feature of humanity, which evolved some time after the split between the human and chimp lineages,” he says. But “if chimps have culture, then presumably the last common ancestor of chimps and humans had culture” (Perry, 2011).

So far, researchers have observed these variations over years spent studying groups of chimpanzee that have been carefully habituated to the presence of humans. Humans in the mythical era when they and the animals coexisted did not yet possess culture, and it was the animals who possessed prototypes of key cultural products, which the humans had to steal or otherwise acquire before they could learn to produce them and thus make culture. These human acts and the conflicts that resulted led to the disruption of ...